Best One-liner: "You find them, and make it
slow. I want them to suffer. And then...take PICTURES!"

So you send your buddy down to Drug Mart with 50¢ to grab THE WILD GEESE on VHS with Richard Burton. Instead, he comes back with this. We're far
beyond the point where Margheriti and his Campari-swilling cronies are
making any money off of that rental, but, the question is, what are
they getting out of it? I would propose that (like every time a bell
rings, an angel gets its wings) maybe every time a piece of
plagiaristic Italo-trash gets mistakenly rented, Fabio Testi gets
another pair of tight jeans?

Regardless, this is pretty terrible. The
quality is bootleg-level horrid, the action is boring, the characters
bland, the editing stale. It's the kind of flick that makes Michael
Winner look like Orson Welles. It features a fairly awful Jan Nemec/Eloy score––kinda Christopher Cross meets De Angelis. Most everyone seems
to have done their own dubbing, but Kinski must've thrown a tantrum in
post, cause he's been dubbed by a stuffy English gent, which is just
plain whacky.Good day to you, sir

Then Mimsy Farmer shows up about 50 minutes in to ruin
our lives. But there's a lot of schweet things going on as well: Lee van
Cleef with a Rambo-bandana as the badass prisoner sprung for the mission (in a role reversal
from ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK),Science cannot explain my irrational dislike for Mimsy Farmer (shoulda been Grace Jones)

Ernest Borgnine doing his patented "Borgnine-grin,"Truly Kinski's madness holds no power in the face of a Borgnine-grin

the operation at hand is called "Operation: Cleaning,"
there's a generic villain named 'Khan' ("You find them, and make it
slow. I want them to suffer. And then...take PICTURES!"), and the line
"That's Americans for you! The only serious thing we've ever done is
revolt against your king, since then, it's just been Hollywood,
Hollywood..."

This movie's full of head-scratchers––like the weird nuzzle/forehead rub van Cleef does with Mimsy at the end.Not sure where this came from.

And where
does this guy keep getting ice cold Buds in the middle of the jungle?I'm reminded of the finale of DELTA FORCE––beers for everybody!

Why do the silenced gunshots sound like a pinball ricochets? How does a
car drive sideways along the wall of a tunnel?This is truly one of the more majestic scenes in film history: Lewis Collins, while driving his car in a tunnel, swerves to avoid some construction and drives sideways down the tunnel wall (in miniature) for a good forty-five seconds as Ernest Borgnine tries to wrap his head around it, in vain.

Still, this is far
from being the worst that Italy has to offer. I cheerfully give it two and a half stars.

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Details of Note

Junta Juleil Productions, LTD. is a Brooklyn-based film and theatre production collective founded by Sean Gill, filmmaker and playwright. Junta Juleil's Culture Shock is a film blog dedicated to forgotten and occasionally cheesy genre fare. For more about Sean Gill, visit:
Sean Gill Films.